


Badger in the Well

by KhamanV



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Espionage, Explicit Language, Gen, Intrigue, Political Thriller, Post Black Panther, Post Civil War, Ross is a Swearsalot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:22:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26089369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KhamanV/pseuds/KhamanV
Summary: When a long-afield CIA agent and old friend sends Everett Ross a cache of potentially explosive information about a corrupted world of secrets thriving within the government, Ross's ideals mean he has no choice but to seek out the truth no matter where it leads. And soon it won't only be these secrets at risk of being buried for all time, but Ross himself.Sometimes the only superpower we have is the defiant need to be a good person.
Comments: 48
Kudos: 46





	1. Eat Shit, Jack Ryan

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is based on a version of Everett Ross I used in a Codex story called 'Escape Velocity' but is entirely standalone. Any details used from that story are reintroduced here without the need to be familiar with anything in the Codex series. Yes, I've finally written a truly standalone MCU fic, and yes, it's about Everett frickin' Ross. I know, right?
> 
> This will be a politically themed story, as such spy thrillers often are, but while the real world is in a certain amount of (batshit) flux, this story is a work of *fiction* and all characters themselves are also fictional unless specifically noted. As it remains set in a world of superheroes and impossible science, all resemblance to real world events is either coincidental or a dumb gag on my part. A certain real world political name that is almost inescapable in our daily lives will make no appearance here. I promise. We're here to have a good time. Or a weird one, at least.
> 
> Updates will be a little bit random, but should be steady. I hope you enjoy it!

**Badger in the Well**

_Danger confronted properly is not something a man must fear ~ Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October_

. . .

1\. Eat Shit, Jack Ryan

. . .

Most people in the agency, upon meeting career CIA Agent Everett Ross for the first time, developed two seemingly easy assumptions about his personality that then forever colored their behavior with him. The first was that he had an air of uptight but earnest fecklessness. The second was that it would be simple to work with him, as the former typed him as very much a go along to get along person despite his occasionally prickly veneer.

Neither assumption was accurate.

Everett Ross was a tiny badger full of incalculable rage _at least_ 80% of the time and not counting when he was sleeping. To his credit, he was very well aware of the secret, bottomless well of anger he carried deep inside his heart, kept it there, and - he hoped - he would be able to sit on it without it spilling over in a consuming inferno of _fuck this-fuck you-fuck it **all**_ until he died. His agency portfolio had a better listing of his therapy routine than his own doctor’s files. He knew half a dozen meditation styles. Most of them he didn’t think exactly worked so much as simply bought him a little time to chill the hell out and focus on reading a book for a while, which for all he knew was the goal of meditation anyway.

He cultivated that uptight fecklessness everyone saw in him, and made an _effort_ to get along with others so that it would seem as easy as they assumed, and he did so because as a general rule it wasn’t the ordinary everyday people he met that deserved any part of his ire. He put in the daily grind to be useful, helpful, and generally kind to others around him to the point that a few of those that _thought_ they knew him better believed he had a naive streak that guided him into looking for the best in someone to the ignorance of all else.

Those people were typically assholes and ended up trying to use him at the agency, and somehow it never quite worked out for them. But because all they saw was the Professional Ross, they never figured out it was the Murder Ross that had quietly decapitated their latest bullshit plans for him.

At home, in privacy, among his cluster of spider plants and Boston ferns and the occasional struggling patch of violets in a windowsill pot, the real Everett Ross had time to relax and be himself.

Currently Everett was hatewatching the latest season of the television show he hated most in the entire goddamn world right now. He hadn’t told his therapist he was watching it because she would ask the very right and useful question of why he was doing this to himself, and Everett would have to mumble through his answer and get another therapist in act of fully aware shame, and for the sake of his professional reputation in the agency he should really try to stick this one out for a while.

John Krasinski ran from another unlikely string of explosions, his hurried departure cut off by the giant logo of the streaming service and followed by some inane-ass commercial for some other streaming show he’d rather die than watch. Ross already had a mild and admittedly unreasonable dislike for the actor, having been a fan of the original Office UK series when he was overseas working with the British intelligence services. Halpert was a step down from his favorite, Tim Canterbury, but Ross still got the same jokes from people about the twinned characters. Thus, Krasinski’s mere existence had become a sticking point for Ross.

The Jack Ryan show was putting Ross over the edge.

“You’re a _fucking analyst!_ ” Ross bellowed at his television set, an empty can of theoretically flavored sparkling water that had more likely once seen a crummy JPEG of a raspberry beginning to crumple in his hand. “Sit on your ass at a cheap desk and get a headache from staring at a sixteen gig zipfile of sat pictures of Iran, you fucking wanker!”

Everett might’ve been in Europe a little too long. He’d taken the failures of the JTTC with grace and resumed generalized field activity after the incident in Vienna, but he kept all the best curse words and local slang from every country he’d worked with. He pulled himself up from an old lounge chair whose armrests were picked fuzzy by agitated fingernails and wandered into the kitchen, still muttering to himself about all the ways an actual CIA analyst would get his stupid ass killed two days into a random field assignment.

“ _Oh_ , but Jack used to be a _Marine_ ,” he wheedled at himself, playing a game he called ‘the strawman’s advocate.’ “So the fuck what, I was an Air Force pilot that actually _saw_ combat. He got his back broken a month in or some shit, assuming these fuckholes actually care about the books anymore. _I_ ran campaign operations over Iraq. I still sit at a desk most of the time.” He threw the can out with more viciousness than necessary and went to grab a stick of cheese out of a bag in the fridge. “And being in the field is only marginally less boring than being strapped to a desk.” He lifted his head out of the fridge and snapped at his living room. “If being a field agent gets _too_ exciting, it means an analyst fucked up somewhere!”

The nasty little creature that lived in the back of his mind, that sounded just like him only snottier, and existed solely to rile him up further, reminded him that the Ulysses Klaue operation had turned into some hot shit on a shingle, and that hadn’t been any analyst’s fault.

He stared into the abyss deep within the ancient Kenmore fridge that had come with the apartment and took a deep, calming breath. “No, that was an overall agency failure related to the general historical failures of Western civilization and the various mistakes included under that umbrella. We had no opportunity to be aware of nor have a tactical response to Wakanda because our ancestors had to be assholes to everyone else, aka, the Human Problem.”

Yes, but he’d looked very cool remote-piloting a Wakandan droneship right up until he had to take a panic dive to not get exploded out of Princess Shuri’s lab.

“Was a hell of a day,” he allowed, going over the memories again. They were pretty good ones, actually.

They’d probably cast John Krasinski in his role if they ever made a docudrama about Wakanda’s entry into today’s society, said his brain goblin. All shiny-faced and upfront on the poster, the one affable award-bait white guy sucking up the oxygen the rest of the cast deserved. With Mahershala Ali, maybe. In the background.

“Motherfuck,” said Ross, slamming the fridge shut and going back to the living room just in time to watch a barely-grimed fictional CIA agent continue to do all the cool shit people thought the CIA did and usually didn’t.

There was a desk in a tiny little office next to his equally tiny bedroom. On it was a handful of color-coded USB sticks heavily secured with propriety software, and enough printout stacks to scare the Sequoia National Forest. All low-sec stuff that met the extremely tight requirements for homework. There was nothing cool on that desk. Everett Ross hadn’t needed to be in the field in eight months, not since that minor pickup job out of Estonia. The last semi-major op had been the time he was temp assigned to SHIELD and somehow ended up offworld for more than 24 hours, which was something the CIA decided they frowned upon. It was probable that that job had him slow-rolled on operations for a while. That was fine. He could probably use a break.

Krasinski’s baffled-ass look, as if he didn’t understand why the world was falling apart around him, was much less acceptable.

“You stupid git,” said Ross, dropping back into his seat and gnawing on his nightly cheese like the hateful badger he privately was.

. . .

Ross kept to a schedule in order to maintain a firm grip on his temper. Routine allowed him an extra sense of control, although he didn’t feel the need to be too compulsive about it if he was in the field or whatnot. It was a tool, not a singular cure, and it was, he would admit, one of the better things to come out of his years of therapy sessions.

His normal weekday routine included a light breakfast, fifteen minutes of meditation, and an hour on the computerized treadmill; one of his few extravagant purchases, and neatly listed on his CIA file. After that, it was a day at Langley, which included several hours of meetings, in-house analytics, bitching about the amount of intel outsourcing now bottlenecking critical operations, shitty coffee, and then more analytics at whatever desk he was currently assigned. He then came home, read a book over dinner, watched a scant amount of bad TV, checked the mail he’d brought up coming home, meditated, read a book in his bedroom, and went to sleep. In theory, anyway.

Tonight Ross would not be getting to those latter bits of his routine. Having taken all he could of television’s shittiest field agent for one eve (Ross knew the show was critically well-regarded, but _he_ didn’t give a fuck), Ross was now standing over his desk, having fanned out the day’s mail with his fingertips.

There was a white envelope that was, by some miracle, not from a bank or car dealership. It had his address, handwritten neatly, marked with excessive postage, and listed no return. There was a thin bulge to it that his fingers recognized as another USB stick.

The envelope was also addressed to a ‘Carbon E. K. Ross.’

Carbon had been his nickname in the Air Force, another well-meant jab at his sometimes prickly outward nature. He had been a reliable pilot, one anyone was happy to fly with, especially when the seats got hot, and when his birds went down - which it did, a couple of times - it was because of things far beyond any one person’s control. The nickname followed him to the CIA, at least for a little while, and was known to a dwindling handful of other agents that actually knew the real Ross lurking under that famed prickly affability.

This was meant to be a very personal letter between two people that had been in the shit. With a USB stick included.

Ross wasn’t an idiot, and he’d made his career on being stupid as rarely as possible. He took his fingers off the envelope and went to double-check the locks on his door. Then he ambled around the house, doing a quick but still ordinary version of his nightly routine, pulling the blinds and the curtains, and then leaving on only one dim light in the windowless office.

He left the door to it open, though. He could hear unwanted entry better that way. Then he sat at his desk and took a small but powerful LED flashlight out of a drawer and lit the envelope from behind. Squinting, he identified one sheet of paper with more handwriting, and one USB stick, the kind that cost six bucks at a Best Buy. No powder. No marks of interference. The envelope was exactly as advertised.

He owned an enamel letter opener painted like a lightsaber, and he used that to slice the top open. He left the USB alone at first, but took out the letter, shook it to be certain, then gingerly unfolded it to read it.

Then he read it again, his breath coming soft and nervous now.

_Carbon_ , it began. _Stronger message to follow. Got some weird shit in my life and didn’t know who to tell about it. So I picked old Diamond Ass himself, remembering how you were a great listener back when we were hanging out with Harvey. Sorry about dropping back into your pad and your life like this. I’d apologize in person, but that’s probably not going to happen. It’s a family thing, you know how it is. But we’re looking at a divorce, and you know that’s tough._

_Look, this isn’t the way I wanted to start talking to you again, but I just wanted to tell someone that I needed a friend. If you can get in touch somehow, that would mean a lot to me. If you can’t, I know you’ll do your best. You’re a stand-up guy, Carbon. If you trust someone, I trust them. And Ross, I can’t trust much anymore._

_Hope to hear from you soon,_

_Adrian Corcoran_

. . .

Ross put the letter down and shook the stick out, staring at it. It was going to have a coded password, and Corcoran’s instructions told him how to unlock it. The joke gift given him when they got out of ops training together at Harvey Point, a one-time pad that Ross had kept. In fact, Corcoran, a laconic but affable guy he’d liked a lot, had called last year and casually asked mid-chat if he still had it. The only way to talk about the last months of CIA training without being in a secure location, by talking around it. Ross dug it out of a box at the time and left it in his desk. He hadn’t thought any more about it, not then.

He pulled the pad out and studied the complex key. Then he studied the letter again, looking for something to mark certain words in the text. It wasn’t difficult. HARVEY was obviously part of the code, and that made it easier to find the rest of the faint dots impressed into the paper by certain letters.

It took him ten minutes to break down the cipher. It took another five to boot up the old ‘honeypot’ laptop shoved into the back corner of the desk, an absolute crapper of a computer that could no longer connect to the internet even if God Themselves wanted it to. If there was a virus or other automated program on the stick, it was going to spin its wheels on _that_ sucker.

When he installed the USB, the password prompt came up. He put in the broken code and hesitated before hitting ENTER. If he fucked up, there was a real chance whatever was on the stick would eat itself. But he’d double-checked his work and had no reason to doubt it. He pressed the key.

The stick contained several large zip files and a master document. Everett opened the doc, slumped back in his seat, and let out a low whistle of mixed dismay and awe as he absorbed what it was telling him.

Corcoran’s ‘stronger message’ was within, and there wasn’t much to like about it.


	2. Office Space

2\. Office Space

. . .

Tuesday was, on its surface, an ordinary day at the CIA roost. Ross drank his shitty coffee, studied the satellite photos of some new building in the ass end of North Korea they’d got in overnight, and kept his mouth shut even while his brain chugged on. He engaged in the usual nonsense small talk, and felt no unusual looks thrown in his direction. All was clear. So far, anyway.

Ross’s reputation for an almost prudish devotion to rules and regs within the walls of the building wasn’t entirely built on misty castles. The first thing he was _supposed_ to do upon receiving Corcoran’s upsetting little package was to hand it over to the proper authorities within the Agency. And in some circumstances, he would have done exactly that.

But he hadn’t. He would have to, eventually, but he hadn’t. First he thought about what he’d read, recalling the words and the implications while he stared at co-ordinate-labeled packages sent by classified machines all over the world, piecemeal intel that wanted passover glances before sitting with analysts that would have the context necessary for any actual study. The daily grind told him about the usual horrors of human life on a human world.

Corcoran’s package told him a great deal more about certain individual roles in that horror.

. . .

Everett Ross was not a CIA apologist. It was a common intellectual hobby among a lot of agents, many of them becoming more dug-in and defensive on the topic as they moved towards retirement age. Ross appreciated his work at CIA specifically _because_ he was well aware of the agency’s history of ops black enough to garner rightful international outcry, and wanted to do his part to make the agency not such a heavy-handed and blatant pack of bastards. He believed in the ideals of international intelligence without losing that sense of collective humanity, and was cynical enough to know that he was too often a minority.

He’d made a few of the right friends over that stance, a rare few ‘angels’ at higher levels in the agency who appreciated that he’d been approached for his job by people interested in what he as a Gulf War vet could do to help at the infamous blackbox prison sites in the Middle East, that he had then happily joined the CIA, and then, vocally, he had done absolutely none of that.

It had gone a long way towards establishing that Boy Scout reputation of his. It also made him absolutely no fun at agency parties.

Everett Ross gave not a single glass-walled fuck about that.

He did give a great _many_ fucks about the useless bastard at the DNI who sucked up directly to the current bastards even higher up, and whose useless antics and private contractor jobs were causing more intel bottlenecks as the current administration wore on. He gave a great many fucks about how certain of their tools were on the edge of being used on US soil (assuming something wasn’t being covered up, which gave him the sweats at night) and continually misused on foreign soil, and the drone strikes.

The mother fucking _drones_.

He was, not to put too fine a point on it, a dedicated burr in the agency’s collective ass. But he still had those angels, men and women close to the Directorship who kept him in because they respected the ideas he had about the future of the agency. At least, he thought.

He chewed over what he’d learned, and decided the best thing to do would be to take Corcoran’s information to one of them. In a timely fashion, of course. Sitting on it too long would put him in just as much dip and with no method to help.

. . .

Ross knocked on the door twice and waited for the person that was absolutely not the deputy’s secretary to let him in. The man buzzed him in and then sat up straight behind a desk with a little wood and bronze plaque on it to let visitors understand, discreetly, that they were in one of the many beating hearts of the Counterintelligence Mission Center. This office was in a bland looking but _extremely_ secure satellite location a few miles away from the main headquarters, and most people driving by thought it was a bank.

The man’s posture said he had his hand on his sidearm. The man’s expression was mostly blank, but with a vaguely ominous look of ‘it’s cool, it’s procedure, don’t take it personal if I have to shoot you in the brain.’

After years in the agency, that particular aura just washed over Ross the way a veteran cashier could learn to stare through the latest angry customer and he nodded politely to the man with no name on his badge. “Everett Ross, Operations, CTC. I’m three minutes early, sorry, elevator was really on its game today.”

The man, who was probably either an ex-SEAL or Special Forces officer just for the sheer terrifying cachet of having a pet killer at the door, relaxed another tiny smidge. The hand remained on the gun, of course. “Ms. Millen will be with you momentarily.”

“Cool,” said Ross, and he took the only visitor’s seat, which was next to a table laden with no magazines whatsoever. There was, however, a tiny plastic succulent in a pretty pastel pot.

He sat there for about thirty seconds. There was no buzz from the phone on the desk, nor any visible motion anywhere in the room. Including from the nameless man steadily watching him. And then. “The deputy is ready for you.”

“Thank you,” said Ross, and he stood up and politely ignored the urge to turn around and stare baldly at the dim little LED that he knew was hidden just underneath a sprinkler head above the visitor’s chair, because that was how people liked their power plays sometimes and he was capable of rolling with it when necessary.

. . .

The CIA’s actual method of internal organization is generally considered a secret kept from public scrutiny. It would be _nice_ , thought Ross, if it wasn’t so damned obscure to the people that worked in it, too.

Ms. Millen was a career counterintelligence officer with plenty of weight to throw around. Her official title was something like Deputy Assistant to the Assistant Director of the Operations Directives or some entangled shit like that, but realistically, she was Ms. Millen, she knew more about plastic explosives than an arson-obsessed demon, she was not to be messed with for several more reasons beyond that, and she was one of Ross’s more vocal allies. She smiled under a perfectly coiffed bowl of marble-white grandma hair and, without rising from the very intimidating desk she commandeered, reached out a thin, slightly speckled hand to Ross as he came in. “Evie, darling, how are you today?”

There were three people on Earth allowed to call Everett ‘Evie.’ One was his mother, and she was dead. The second was his high school girlfriend, and she was a thousand miles and a few decades away. The third was Ms. Millen because when Ms. Millen picked a cute name for you, you fucking took it and smiled back with the most sincere expression of pleasure you could manage.

Unless you wanted to track whale farts from the listening station off the Eastern coast of Russia, an infamous hellhole that got fresh produce in twice a year if they were lucky.

Ross smiled and took her hand with a courtly grace any nobleman of Earth or otherwise would have been proud of. “I’m fine. Ms. Millen. And you’re as eternal as ever.”

“God damn right I am, Agent Ross. Despite that useless prick trying to reshuffle me and my department all the way out the door.” She let go of him and flopped back into her cushioned deskchair, her palms clapping onto the armrests. A second later, one of those palms flicked like a knifethrower. “Have a seat. I know you’re not here to listen to me bitch about the DNI.”

“No, ma’am, but I could for hours,” he said, honestly. Millen had a gift for invective and glass-edged savagery that he envied. He offered a tidbit she would certainly already know, just to establish a friendly baseline. “Between you and me, his contractor pickup for chatter monitoring through the Straits is fucking us.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Millen, neatly picking up her end of the dance. She’d give a coy piece of gossip back if she was pleased. She did. “There’s an investigation going on into the legitimacy of that contract - but you didn’t hear that, and not from me.”

Ross chuckled and said nothing, just like he was supposed to.

“So.” Arms folded in and her hands plopped onto the lap of her dark navy pantsuit. “What _does_ bring you in today, Ross? You indicated it was important.”

He’d long since decided to get right to it, without any of the hesitations that sometimes snuck into his voice in the field. “I received a letter from another field agent. I’m unaware of his assignment, nor his current status with the agency, but he felt I was a trustworthy source to be sent a package. One page letter, containing a code, and a USB stick with password matched to the page’s code.”

Ms. Millen’s expression didn’t outwardly change, but something shifted in the air. He couldn’t identify it. “Did you assess the stick?”

“To an extent. The code was based on a one-time pad he’d previously given to me. I’ve kept the key.” He tapped at his suit jacket, which contained the parcel. He would offer it when she asked for it. Doing otherwise had a non-zero chance of bringing in the desk guy and his sidearm. “And I did discover several large zip files with an overview document attached.”

She continued to study him, the silent command for him to continue carrying plainly through some unknowable ether.

“The document alleges a broad conspiracy of corruption within our intelligence services, ma’am. Mr. Corcoran claims the files contain direct evidence, and that the source of this extensive corruption is reliant on the motions of at least one large corporation. He doesn’t name the organization in the master document, but leaves an implication that it bears some relation to the Extremis event involving Tony Stark some years ago.

“I have not unzipped the files that are on this USB.” An extremely literal truth. Ross looked Ms. Millen in the eyes when he said it. “If there’s weight to Mr. Corcoran’s allegations, I wouldn’t be positioned to assay them appropriately on my own. I felt it would be better to hand this over to a superior officer.” He smiled. “And I can think of no one I respect or trust more when it comes to the integrity of the agency, Ms. Millen.”

She favored him with a smile of her own. “You brought the package Mr. Corcoran sent you, then.” She gestured at the pocket he tapped. “Please set it on the desk in front of you.”

He pulled out the sliced envelope and its contents as efficiently as possible. Once it was set down, she gestured for him to push it towards her. He did, not surprised when she didn’t immediately go to pick it up. Safety protocols. Gun-boy could do it when Ross left. “I’d be happy to help assess the files, ma’am. Corcoran is a good agent. If he thinks he found something worth blowing a whistle over, then I’m worried.”

“Of course you would be. You’re a good man yourself, Agent Ross.” Ms. Millen rubbed her palms across the arms of her chair again. “I’ll talk it over with the director, but I warn you now that it probably won’t be necessary. We’ll take care of it, thoroughly, and with full oversight.” She granted him another warm smile, softening the words that carried that unmistakeable undertone of warning. To ask no more questions about the package. _For your own safety, Evie_ , said that smile.

Something unsavory prickled at the back of Ross’s neck. An image of a whale breaching, then sinking deep, deep within the ocean to be lost forever. Sweat beaded on his neck beneath a white collar, then wicked away. None of it showed on his face.

Ross could be _very_ good at poker, but only when money was on the table. He might throw up later, though, in dodgy bathroom that he’d checked for bugs. “I’m glad I came to you.”

She chuckled. “So am I, Agent Ross. You’re a credit to the agency. I’ve never once regretted keeping an eye on your career.” She jutted her chin towards the door, a look of apology softening the dismissal. “Unfortunately, I’ve got an appointment in five with someone.”

“Of course. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice, ma’am.” Ross got up from the chair and smoothed the front of his jacket with an absent gesture. “Good luck with the director. I’ll hope for the best,” he finished, and left.

. . .

Ross swept through Millen’s waiting room without looking at the guard dog. Then he paused, his hand on the doorknob. Risky, but fuck it. The _mood_ was setting in hard. “If you’re sitting there trying to look aggressive with your hand on your piece, everyone knows you’ve either got the lock on like you’re supposed to and need a second to draw down, or you’ve got it off like most of the ‘roid chuds that wash out of Bragg think they can get away with doing. Either way, you don’t look scary, you look like a tool that really wants to be deaf before he’s fifty. Look like a professional. The desk alarm is your better weapon at the start of closed room defense.”

“Hey-“ snapped the guard dog, the sound of a chair rattling following Ross as he sailed through the door, hoping that the elevator was still on its game and that the guy would remember he wasn’t allowed to leave his post.

Thirty seconds later, Ross was unscathed and looking for the shitty coffee machine several floors down, already back to acting like it was just another day at work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> naturally life in 2020 is a galaxy-encompassing flaming hellscape and the last couple of weeks have been as 'special' as an exploding gas can that smells like hot butts and stale doritos, but I am stiLL TRYING GORD DANG IT.
> 
> for your trivia night, no I don't actually know where Millen and the CIMC hang out. 'Langley' is a casual name for the overall CIA compound. The bulk of it rests on the banks of the Potomac River, which itself is the dividing line between Virginia and DC/Maryland. The main building is named for George HW Bush, who was director of the CIA in the late 70's and managed to both ignore the Khmer Rouge and kick off Operation Condor in South America with its string of assassinations, but hey, cool building.
> 
> (look the story is fictional but skip my notes, maybe)


	3. Tossers

3\. Tossers

There was nothing but a flyer for a local furniture store in Ross’s narrow mailbox, so he left it there and continued up the carpeted staircase to his door. He paused with his key in the lock, leaning forward to press his head against the cool wood. That was a big selling point for the otherwise grotty little rental in a Virginia ‘burb. The door was made of good, solid hardwood, not a hollow particleboard shell like a lot of newer places. The brass hinges were in fine shape, too, and he oiled them every couple of months to keep them that way.

There was a trick to the door, a small one that he only noticed when it turned winter his first year living in it and he started getting a faint draft in the living room that he didn’t like. Tugging it shut and locking it was always a guaranteed affair. However, it took a _firm_ tug to fully seal the door the last couple millimeters, where the rubber bit at the bottom locked in against the metal bit on the floor.

The door hadn’t been tugged that firmly since it was last closed. It was a habit Ross had deliberately cultivated, so he knew damn well it had been sealed all the way when he left. He closed his eyes and listened, pretty sure that whoever tossed his apartment after leaving Ms. Millen’s office wouldn’t stick around, and hopefully hadn’t raided his already sparse fridge.

He heard nothing, so he went inside, and he tugged the door shut good and hard behind him, as if making a point to someone that had fucked up in at least one way. Odds were it hadn’t been the guard dog Ross went out of his way to piss off, but it was who he pictured anyway. He put his handful of paper files down and began a thorough walkthrough to see if his uninvited guest had fucked anything else up.

On the first scan, no. The bed had been carefully rearranged how he’d left it, the book on his side table was laying the right way. The bureau with a bunch of crisply folded button-ups and a pile of more haphazard Star Wars-themed tees looked pretty much how he recalled.

The office was where he suspected he would win his little in-house game of Spot the Difference, and he was right. The honeypot laptop was a bit out of true, and the thing was so crap that when he put his hand on it, it was still warm. The handful of work-related USB sticks were mostly left alone - whoever had come in probably had a checklist of legit stuff to ignore when tossing the place - and the copy he’d made of Corcoran’s stick was gone.

Ross tapped the empty place where it had been, a vicious smile slowly creeping onto his face. There was a corrupted version of Corcoran’s files on it, demonstrating that pulling a brute-force copy of the files to another location didn’t work.

That was bullshit, of course. Ross had copied the files and then deliberately mangled them with a nifty little program a hacker kid the FBI had recruited out of prison made a couple years back. It wasn’t a ruse that would hold up if someone really went digging through the garbage, but he had a hunch that wouldn’t happen. Nor would he get blowback for attempting a copy and forgetting to mention it. He was a long-timer, it was expected he’d try a few basic tricks to assess incoming intel from potentially rogue sources. More importantly, burials in the woods at night were hurried affairs. Details slipped away. And bringing it up to censure him would only mean more paperwork for someone to erase later. Why bother?

The real test of his visitor’s imagination was next. Ross picked up the old laptop and carefully wiggled out the loose CD drive. It, like the laptop itself, was overlarge and didn’t work for shit. These days, however, it was because the disc drive was missing a couple inches off its business end.

Another USB stick came tumbling out when Ross gave the laptop a little shake. Two days ago it had contained a couple megs of bird pictures from some half-assed vacation Ross had taken a while back. Now it had a fully unlocked copy of Corcoran’s files, master doc, a pdf copy of the physical letter he’d turned over, and a text file of initial notes Ross had started when he scanned the first zip and saw the name Advanced Idea Mechanics all over the place.

He set everything back down and stood there for a while, wondering how likely it was he’d gotten at least some new audio bugs installed in the place.

It was, frankly, pretty fucking likely.

He went to put on the TV and puttered around like the good boy scout with a settled evening routine people thought he was. Not one worth risking a good video surveillance install over, not on such short notice. Then, after dutifully spending a moment swearing at an actor who was the least interesting thing in his life right now, he turned the volume up another notch and went back into the office to start going over Corcoran’s evidence. Properly, this time.

. . .

There is a particular sort of headache that comes on after hours of studying PDFs on a laptop so garbage it can’t even operate a modern color-temp program to help ease eye strain. It feels a bit like a sinus headache at first, but then it crawls up the forehead to grip the widest part of the skull between the temples, and then that sucker _squeezes_ like John Cena making himself a glass of OJ the old-fashioned way at five in the too fucking early morning.

Ross’s headache had shot past this happy bit of fun and was going to blast itself into a full on strain migraine within the hour, which was 3AM, and was going to get even worse by the time he started his morning ‘I’m a happy ol’ agent going to work at the happy fun factory’ routine at six.

The headache wasn’t getting much of his attention. There were about twenty-seven individual awful things jockeying for first place, but for now he was rereading a clip of text messages between a pseudonym’d cutout - an intermediary intelligence source that deliberately lacked certain details about who was behind them - and an initialed government employee who was clearly attached to a big shot in one of the alphabet jobs. FBI, CIA, DNI, DIA, NSA, DEA, the list went on. Ross had it whittled down to high level interior sec, which left out his agency, and which was cold comfort. Worst case, it was someone generically in the Director of National Intelligence’s office, apocalyptic case was someone with access to the National Security Council. Both put this person in the room with White House officials.

He hoped it was DEA, which would be freaky, but limited the amount of damage one person could do.

He wasn’t hoping very strongly, because he already knew better. DEA couldn’t casually pass on high level intelligence to some random, which was a thing these text messages implied was happening. Unfortunately, unlike his game with the USB sticks, these fragments _were_ garbled in a way Corcoran hadn’t been able to recover. They were minor direct evidence, in any case, but went to the agent’s point that high level operations in US Government had been compromised. This fragment was cross-referenced to a set of notes typed up by Corcoran himself, and Ross referred back to them as he reread the texts.

_Cutout operating under AIM guidance_ , said the notes with an authority Ross wasn’t convinced of just yet. _Fragment 22.34 indicates high level connection direct. Military purchasing is surface. Intel swap. No proper channels. Someone else indicated_.

It was the ‘someone else’ that had Ross’s back up. Corcoran thought he was seeing another, external party involved along with Advanced Idea Mechanics, and that opened up a lot of worrying scenarios.

Ross knew about AIM. Anyone in counterterror and counterintel did, the Extremis event was now a baseline brief when trainees came in for the segment on metahuman or enhanced human engagement. Ross had _written_ part of the early training docket, and it had been a major reason he got tapped for heading up the task force in charge of watching over the signing of the Sokovia Accords in Vienna several years later. AIM had been _the_ think tank and engineering outfit horning in on Lockheed Martin’s ‘Skunkworks’ niche ever since Stark took his people out of the business. Even Hammer Industries fell behind AIM on the power rankins.

However, AIM’s deceased founder, Aldrich Killian, had also left behind a trove of information about his attempts to influence, terrorize, and outright destroy the US and its government via a shellgame of cutting edge technology and psyops use of a terrorist organization, the Ten Rings. Hell, Tony Stark himself had paid for the new wing (actually an unmarked building in a major US city) devoted to observing an organization whose creations had resulted in not only the attempted murder of the infamous engineer, but then-President Ellis, himself.

Its prevalence in Corcoran’s documents was more than concerning, it seemed ridiculous on its surface. AIM had survived the threat of being completely dismantled after Killian’s stunt, finally changing private hands under government oversight. Its new CEO was a former DC lobbyist with a Hollywood starlet wife, the exact sort of people that could withstand being audited six different ways every year for the next twenty years by agents assigned to that new ‘wing.’ The current chief scientist was some harmless MIT wonk named George, for god’s sake. Every ‘George’ Ross had ever met was milquetoast incarnate.

But in his documents, Corcoran was suggesting that, despite - or _because_ \- of its years of intense surveillance and heavy hand of the intelligence services to keep them on the straight and narrow, AIM was now a major player in corrupting those very services.

And they had unidentified help doing it.

Ross, just for the growing sense of futility that warred with his headache, opened the ‘pending’ folder he’d set up for all the files he hadn’t gotten to yet. He had told Ms. Millen something very true - this was far too much for any one agent to puzzle out. Corcoran had a theory, a reason for the theory, and had proceeded to scrape together an orgy of information before sending it out like a cradle on the river. Some of it, Ross suspected, had been gathered hastily. Things Corcoran himself hadn’t had time to sift through before chucking it desperately into his cache. The pending folder was _massive_. All those zipped files had strained against the 32 gig limit of the USB stick. Unpacked, it threatened to become a ‘zip bomb,’ consuming the bulk of the semi-recently installed expanded hard drive and frying it. And his brain. Basic mortality had its limits, though he’d never much wished to find out he was one of the new Inhumans.

There was a business card fiddling around in his off hand. It was ivory, ordinary, bore the name of a dive bar with two addresses, one on the East Coast, and one on the West, and only had one phone number printed neatly along the bottom of it.

Of all the alphabet soup agencies operating within the USA, only one had succeeded in remaining a black box since its inception. It had been established by the very people that had quietly changed the course of World War II alongside Captain Steve Rogers. It didn’t answer to ODNI. It had a veiled seat on the security council, via the lone general assigned to oversee it. Its infiltration and near-destruction by Hydra had since been shaken off like so much dust from a dog’s fur. Its directorate was currently held by one affable man who looked no more threatening than Everett Ross himself. A large portion of their agents were now classified as metahuman.

At _least_ one was an actual space alien.

SHIELD drove the stodgy government infrastructure of the US batshit insane.

Everett Ross had an ‘in,’ due to that previous little job that had probably gotten him chained to a desk for a while. The Director of SHIELD sort of-kind of owed him one for helping out. Might be enough to help get him some trustworthy eyes on this stuff. A contact he could trust to bounce some stuff off of. Maybe even help trace Corcoran’s current location.

It was something, and it was now almost 4 in the morning. He fished out his personal phone and went deep for the barely used Signal app, a secure texting service. Not perfect, but it would do for this. He thought for a while, looking at the blank screen of the app. Once he did this, there wasn’t going to be a clean way out. He would be fully committed to whatever happened next.

The hesitation didn’t last. This was the right thing to do. He’d tried it the CIA way and watched a cover-up begin in front of his eyes. They’d tossed his apartment within hours. Corcoran, a burly, happy dude who’d signed on out of an Ivy League law school, had _trusted_ him. It wasn’t a choice, not really.

His thumb swept across the phone. _In desperate need of a good drink. Current hours_?

A response came back within five minutes. Seven PM was a good time on the East Coast, according to SHIELD’s nameless operator. They were running a pop-up bar in Virginia, not too far from his apartment. A quick look on Google Maps showed it was a real bar that had existed for the last several yars.

“Okay,” whispered Ross to himself, the prickly fear sweat coming back. He didn’t regret his choice, and he doubted he would.

That didn’t change that whatever came next was probably going to be life-changing, and eventually, terrible.


	4. Deep Fried

4\. Deep Fried

. . .

The bar was one of those _aesthetic_ places deep in suburban Arlington with sporty/Scottish shit all over the walls, which cut the probability that there was anyone from DC, much less the agency, having a bite here by about 95%. Most of the careerists stayed close to the wharf or the traditional stomping grounds of the Navy Yard, either Chosen Ones sipping cocktails with the generals, or bopping randomly between a series of either known-safe or ‘who gives a fuck’ dive bars.

Ross didn’t drink much, mostly because he knew his mouth shot off even faster the looser he felt. He’d indulge in a rare shot or three from a bottle, at home, frightening no one but the houseplants. Still, he swung up to the busy but not packed bar and picked a seat like he knew exactly what he wanted. The bartender, some fresh-faced college kid with hard enough eyes to say he knew what he’d put up with, glided in front of him with both hands on the counter.

“Got a bunch of new crafts on tap,” said the kid, and proceeded to list off at least eight microbrews that Ross had never heard of, with the sort of expression that said he didn’t give a rip, either.

“Guinness,” said Ross, not caring if that was on tap or not. It was, so hey. He looked around as the pour started, noting a bunch of suburb locals in for some evening fish and chips or what looked like a pretty decent burger. It didn’t seem like a place with the food as a focus, but he had to admit the smell of frying batter was good. The bar itself was peppered with the usual working class grunts taking a load off. He, in a tee and old jacket, hair ruffled like he just got off the clock at an H&R Block, looked completely, obnoxiously normal. A forgettable, rubbery-faced figure drinking it up on the dividing line between DC insanity and Virginia hospitality.

A woman slid into the seat one over from him, leaving the one between them empty. Proper etiquette at bars, theaters, and urinals the world over. He looked down into the spitting foam of his beer, his cheek twitching as the woman dropped her nice leather purse onto the empty seat. He glanced at it as she ordered, saw the framed business card dangling on a brand new keychain. It was for a company named No Fuss No Fury Moving. Bore the red, blue, and white logo of a heater-style shield, the triangularish ones that had the flat top and curved around to a bottom point. Nice touch, that.

The woman met his eye and gave him a curt nod. He nodded back, knuckling a gesture at the bag. “Funny, I was thinking about looking up some estimates.”

She looked at him, puzzled, then down at her purse as if the obvious dawned on her. She was _good_. “Oh, right.” She pulled her own drink towards herself, protective. “Well, I’d be the best person to ask. I’m in the office most of the time these days.” She cocked her head, a few strings of rich brown hair falling loose. “Used to chuck it around with the best of them, but I’ve stepped back a bit for the last couple of years. Take it lighter.”

“Don’t let me make you work for free,” Ross said, making it sound like a joke.

She flapped her left hand, grimacing in a friendly enough way. “If you wanted me to write up a full estimate, I’d tell you to call in during office hours. Want to pay for my beer? I’ll tell you the rates and even make sure they match up when you call up formally for a move.” She looked at him. “ _Are_ you thinking of moving house?”

He shook his head. “Not exactly. Not yet, anyway. I’ve just got a bunch of stuff in the office that needs storage. Some fumigation risk in the apartment right now. Need a real good place, you know how it is around here.”

The woman chuckled. “Yeah, I do. Well, we run plenty of lockers, temp controlled, 24 hour security, guy at the gate at all times sort of thing if you wanted to take a look at that. Discreet, secure, and fast. The old boss was a stickler for it, and these days, we still make sure we live up to the ideals he instilled.”

Nick Fury. “He doing good in retirement?”

“Terrific,” said the woman with a laugh. “Wouldn’t think he’s retired at all.” She fished in her purse for a copy of the card in her keychain, pushing it across the bar to him. “I’m Maria. You’re…?”

“Everett.” He picked up the card, swapped hands, and then offered his right over for a shake. The SHIELD agent had a good, firm grip with no unwanted waver to it. A shooter’s grip. He wagered her license was _extremely_ up to date. “Appreciate the tip. To be honest, I’m pretty convinced already.”

“Could at least look us up on Yelp,” she teased, letting go.

“I refuse to install that goddamn app.” Not to mention it seemed like Yelp wanted more access to everyone’s cellphone data than the fucking Russian Embassy. He pulled the card towards himself, ready to put it in his pocket. Then it fell out of his hand. “Shit,” he muttered, bending over for it. A tissue fell out of his pocket as his head threatened to sweep the filthy floor.

Maria reached down to help him. “I can just grab another card,” she said, her fingers curling around the tissue and making it somehow disappear up her sleeve. “Don’t stress yourself about it.”

His fingertips plucked at the edge of the flat card, making it snap once. “I’ve already got it.” He picked it up and gave it a snap, actually getting it into his jacket pocket this time. “Usual office hours?”

“Nine to six, almost every day of the week. That’s when you’ll get me or my assistants on the line. Although you can get through after hours, too, there’s always a service on pickup.”

“Great,” he said. “I’ll look forward to calling in.” He gestured at her beer. “That’s definitely covered.”

“How about some fries?”

“You’re pushing it.”

“They’re good fries, Everett,” said SHIELD Agent Maria Hill, mild but also hungry. “They toss ‘em for a sec in that corn flour and beer batter you’re smelling.”

That made him hesitate. “All right, sold.”

. . .

Agent Hill strode out of the bar, pleasantly full on a basket of calorie-dense fries her ancestors would have fought God for. She waited until she was back in the generic-looking car SHIELD fobbed off on everyone for covert civ operations before pulling out her phone. In her other hand was the USB stick Ross had passed to her. She doubted it was the original. Ross’s competency was not in doubt; this was probably the sixth full copy to be stashed by this point. The switchboard put her through to the Director within two minutes. “Coulson. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got the pickup. I don’t know what’s onboard, but if he’s squawking to us, it’s probably nothing good.”

She listened to the other end of the line. “He implied he’s being surveilled. Audio for certain, but I’ll bet you twenty they’re doing walkies at least once a night. Don’t approach the apartment, is my rec. Put an eagle on it, maybe, see who’s assigned to patrol, run the faces.”

People left the bar as she listened to Coulson. She studied each one, marked them as civilian, forgot about them. It was a clean meet. No intercept from the teams up and down the street, no new devices in a two block radius. CIA were watching their boy, but they also bought what he sold. She used her ring finger to flick a stray bit of long brown bang hair off of her forehead. “I dunno. Yeah, I’m on my way to handover now. What’s the estimate on first report?” She frowned. “I do think faster is better, Coulson. I’d like to get some prelim to him within 48 if not sooner.”

She looked up at the gray felt interior of the car, a coolly colorless shade guaranteed to impress at least some existential depression onto any driver. “Who else do we have inside the CIA? Only that guy? What about-oh.” She grimaced. Ex-Hydra infiltrators. _Very_ ex. “Because my recommendation is that we put a bug in someone’s ear about getting Ross on administrative leave. He’s going to want to time to look this over again himself when we’ve got initial. Or he’s like you, and he’s probably going to want to get to sniffing out whatever trail he can. If _he_ asks for leave, that’s a red flag. Push on our guy. I bet he’s got some influence.”

She chuckled, a long-timer’s dry rattle. “I _know_ it’s going to come off like throwing him out into the cold. It’s what Fury would have done. The right jolt gets people moving in the right directions.” She arched an eyebrow, checking her rearview before firing up the car. “It worked on Steve. It’ll work on Ross.” The car revved into life. “He’ll forgive it. Y’know. Later.”

. . .

The next day. 9:30 AM. CIA Headquarters, admin level:

“What the fuck? What the _fuck_? _What the fuck_?” Ross’s entire body tensed. In fourteen million alternate timelines, his leg uncoiled and field-kicked a steel and aluminum military grade trash can hard enough to put him in the running for season MVP and also dent up the reinforced, soundproofed walls of a lobby that acted as a sort of secure airlock to a number of administrative offices.

In this timeline, however, he grabbed hold of his temper and forced both it and his leg back down. Sure, it would have felt good. Wouldn’t have looked good, though. In an odd scrap of mercy, this particular lobby should be on video monitoring only, no audio. It was expected that people coming and going from what was essentially a trumped-up HR hell might be doing a bit of invective slam poetry at some point therein. The CIA knew where to discreetly place the occasional release valve.

“I’m on leave,” he said in a way that didn’t so much suggest disbelief at the news, but rather the kind of hostile yet deep understanding that meant some motherfucker ought to have it coming instead of him, but the way the world was, such justice would never happen, so he best get it out of his system and deal. “I’m on _fucking_ leave,” he added, this time with a bit of actual disbelief as he quickly mapped out the two obvious reasons this hot bullshit had happened.

The first was that Ms. Millen had kickstarted a series of moves that led to this. Now, he reckoned, there was no doubt that she was, whether her intent was still favorable towards him or not, behind why he’d gotten his apartment tossed and why his shitty little neighborhood suddenly had some _very_ health conscious new joggers every few hours. But putting him on leave? That was smelly.

But he couldn’t discount it.

The other was SHIELD pulled a string. He grimaced. If it _was_ them, they probably thought they were helping. Hell, maybe they even were. It freed up his schedule, certainly, and he doubted CIA was going to blow too much cash following him around if he bought a plane ticket to Sicily or wherever for a week, assuming he didn’t do anything else weird in the process. And by the time he did do something weird, he’d be harder to follow. Would they bother?

He stared down at the overpriced trash can, wondering where in the federal budget its purchase had gotten slotted. It looked like one of those steel-brushed several hundred dollar jobbies that usually had wifi or smart-trash sensors installed because simple foot pedals weren’t _tres chic_ anymore, and Ross would bet his paycheck that a government contractor had bought a slew of them and _then_ paid extra to have all the electronics yanked because you can’t have wifi-capable shit laying around CIA headquarters.

He hated the trash can, suddenly. A white-hot bonfire of malefic rage burst open inside of him, the sort of abrupt fury that once upon a time resulted in the fae folk leaving impossible curses on the foreheads of innocent babies because their parents had fucked up the dinner invites.

It wasn’t really about the trash can, of course. It was about what it stood for. An administration dedicated to intelligence that all too often had the common sense of a gold-plated brick. Five bucks of hard-riding Rubbermaid and a goddamn box of Hefties from Costco would have been fine, but no, an expensive digital trash can that had to be neutered before it entered the building, rendering it dumber than the swivel-lid aforementioned Maiden of Rubber. Jesus _Christ_.

Ross took a breath and stabilized himself again. He could deal with this. He could make this situation workable. Fine. He inhaled again. He was Everett Ross. The professional, who was absolutely not going to flip his shit again once he got out of the admin lobby, and who was going to calmly leave CIA and not come back until he’d gotten some _things_ proper sorted.

First, takeout. From the good Thai place up the next block from his home, who knew he liked it actually spicy.


	5. Fu*king Guy

5\. Fu*king Guy

. . .

The pungent, spicy smell of his large size extra spicy order of prad kra prao stuck with Ross as he stepped towards the curb and its blinking Don’t Walk warning. He eyed the cars that zoomed by with little interest. Cut off from the active bloodstream of the agency, their observational interest in him would dwindle entirely by the end of the night. If it hadn’t already. He was low-priority, fully swept for unusual activity, and simply not that interesting. Now it was just a game of not getting run over by one of the local jackwagons. College football season was in full swing, and everyone was giddy at Virginia Tech’s current ranking.

He waited for the pedestrian light to change and took a step off the curb, popping back on when a little black hatchback with an Uber sign in the window scraped to a stop almost right in front of him. “What the hell?” he snapped at the tinted passenger window.

It rolled down and the woman from the night before looked blandly at him. “I’m your 7:30 ride.”

Irritation from nearly being run over collided with the obvious. “I di-“ _Of course_ he didn’t call for a ride. He bit off the rest and glanced around to see if there was anyone watching their encounter. No one was, so he pulled at the rear passenger door and slid in. “All I ask is that I get to eat my food while it’s still hot. I’ve had a rough day.”

“Yeah, that’s doable.”

His face quirked. “And if one of your guys fucked me over at CIA this morning, could you please tell me upfront?”

“Only if you don’t kick the seats. This is one of our better loaners and I’m not gonna be happy if I have to suck up the deposit.”

“I’m a shouter, I don’t go rock star.” He looked out the window and knew immediately he wasn’t going home. Did SHIELD have satellite locations? He was sure they did. “I didn’t get the rest of your name last night, ma’am.”

“Maria Hill. I’m gonna be your liaison on this from here.” Hill checked her rearview, looking for a stray tail before sparing him a glance. Her eyes were back on the road next, but they roamed frequently, aware of everything around the car while she talked. Solid pair of shooting mitts and a master of defensive driving. Yeah, she was career. Like him. “I’m connected straight to the Director. He signed off on temporarily cutting you loose from the agency, on my recommendation.”

“Alright.” Ross had met Coulson before. Good man. Knew how to control the scene, and used that familiar affability to mask something in him that was much more firm. “Appreciate the straight answer.”

“Yup. That was his rec, if it came up.” Hill turned onto a side street, heading deep into a slice of industrial district that he didn’t know. “As you’ve probably guessed, we’re pulling into a spare rental. Already have some overnight prelim to go over, plus I’m going to give you the full rundown on what we’re seeing in terms of observation.”

“They’re already pulling out, ma’am. If I’m not connected to the agency grid, there’s not a lot of damage I can do. So goes their thinking, anyway.”

“Your guys are pulling out, yeah.” She pulled into a small parking structure, all concrete and rebar. Ross didn’t have to pull out his cell to know he was in a No Service zone. He wasn’t worried. Alert, but not worried. “We spotted something else.”

“Shit,” he said in a flat, faux-conversational tone, genuinely surprised.

Hill pulled into an unmarked spot close to a heavy, flaking red painted door used by janitors and maintenance staff and turned the car off. “You wanna eat while I run it down, or you want a few to digest and I make a couple extra calls?” She turned around in the driver’s seat and looked at the paper bag sat next to him. “That smells like a good curry.”

“Fried egg and everything.”

“Damn, I didn’t even know there _was_ a legit place around here. Let me steal a forkful and I’ll make those calls first.”

. . .

Ross didn’t know what the office was during the day. They’d passed cubicles on the way to what looked like a senior manager’s office, all of them looking like they were actually used by people with personalities, families, and geegaws overspilling the shelves. No one was inside, and Hill hit something on a panel that he suspected turned the office into a fully-protected SCIF, those rare and heavily secured government offices that not only required visitors to turn in their electronics and even most paperwork before entry, but had cutting edge devices installed to make certain of that security.

Maria Hill left him alone while he munched through a hearty chunk of his takeout, dousing the heat with a bottle of water he’d nicked from a generic-looking vending machine on the way up, and she turned up as if cued a minute after he was sure the curry sauce was off his chin. She slid into a chair and stared at him. “Good news or bad news first?” She didn’t pause for his answer. “Actually, I don’t give a rip, we’re starting with the bad news. Your new tail is private military.”

“Dauphin?” Aaron Dauphin was the biggest name and largest pain in the ass in the world of private military contractors right now. Specialized in intel and in spec forces training. His cousin was a player on the Judiciary council, which was really fucking great, thought Ross, since Dauphin hadn’t met an international law he liked yet. Ross dreamed of a day where he’d have an excuse to gut-punch the guy.

She shook her head. “Not his guys. The good news is, we did confirm it isn’t an outfit related to the Sokovian dust-up you ended up in the middle of. You know the Task Force rolled up anyone connected to Zemo, and everyone else is pretty much pretending he doesn’t exist. Our handful of contacts cleared out the last possibles on that.”

“Oh, well, that only leaves an entire world of horrible options open to us.”

“And we don’t know who it is.” She smiled, the sort of meaningless, empty smile that translates into ‘you should make the worst assumption from that.’ “Yup. We’re still running counter, trying to trace him back. But you’ve got some special attention, Agent Ross.”

Ross put the lid back on the soup that came with his food, thinking instead of dwelling on the ominous implications of that. He’d get mad again later. “Whoever it is probably has Corcoran. If he’s alive. AIM isn’t supposed to have any PMC shit on their books, so they’re running in tandem with only the loosest direct connection.” He stared off, still rolling scenarios. “They’re also trying very hard to not get spotted. You saw their guy because you were at another angle, so to speak, they were taught to avoid the notice of guys like me. CIA tossed my apartment, though. They didn’t let these guys in.” He frowned, running through the scene again until he was sure. “No, they didn’t. That was a bridge too far for our contact.”

“You’re assuming whoever’s pissed at you at home made an extra phone call. That there’s a direct infection.”

“Only thing that makes sense. Whatever you’ve got on the inside, look at who Rosalinde Millen spoke to after my visit. 11:30 AM, the day I called you guys.”

“You think she’s connected to this thing?”

“I don’t know.” It hurt a little to say that. “She wouldn’t have authorization to roll my apartment, but whoever she went to with my report would have. And she _would_ have gone upstairs with my package, promptly. Regulations, and the weight of what I had.” He focused back on Hill. “What _do_ I have? I started an outline, but there’s a lot to absorb. You said you had prelim.”

“How do you want it?”

“I want it concise and to the point. The ugly details can be worked out later.”

Agent Hill nodded, respecting that. Then she leaned back in the plasticky office chair and crossed her arms against herself. “The synopsis you worked already had the gist, but here’s the formal upshot: Rogue factors - including but not limited to someone high up in AIM’s operations - have compromised multiple elements of US intelligence and security. Your guy points a finger at an equally compromised set of Congressional officials. We’ve identified one of them from Corcoran’s hints. Financials are being doctored. The _point_ of this isn’t yet clear, we’re working through that.” Hill shrugged. “Things being what they are, it’s usually the standard slate. Influence, power, money, all three. Money seems to be a particular focus, although that might be because they’re in early stages of building a hostile platform. However, these particular moves are already tilting balances beyond this country. And enemy factors are getting clued in. By these same rogue factors.”

“Aw, shit.” Ross shoved away his cardboard cartons, a planet away from being hungry. “Take everything they can, leave a good mess behind.”

“Hey, like I said. At least it isn’t Hydra.” She gave him a thin-lipped smile, knowing it was cold comfort.

“Fucking up our already fragile global society for money. Hydra at least had a purpose.” It came out hot and bitter.

“Now you sound like one of my weirder coworkers.” Maria coughed a laugh.

“He’s right,” said Ross, knowing who she meant. Ross was disgusted with chaos agents and rogue factors easily, there was always a similar through-line of selfishness. They saw toppled nations and their own teams coming out on top. The ordinary people that got hurt were just a numeric blob. He was never able to think like that in return, despite years of service that desensitized most. Instead he judged rogue outfits on their style and intent, while still hating them.

Arms dealers and anyone that made their cash off of violence and chaos were below the bottom of his list, in the sewage pit. This already seemed to be one of those. His thoughts trailed back to the core issue, already working possible scenarios. “Who’d you identify on the hill?”

Maria gave him a small, dry smile. “Senator Robert Kelly.”

Ross tilted his head at her like an alerted, annoyed stoat, a metaphorical dossier spilling open in his mind and reminding him of all the pertinent details. Especially one. “ _That_ fucker.”

“You know him.”

“She said, knowing damn well I do.” Ross shoved back in his seat, the dossier becoming flashes of rapid memory. “And I know you know he headed up the US team assigned to the UN to help write and ratify the Sokovia Accords. Metahuman registration was his baby. When I say _baby_ , I mean he conceived it, carried it, birthed it, cuddled it, and paid for its Ivy League college tuition in full the moment the belly button was knotted off.”

“You’re making it weird, Ross.”

“He made it weird. You know where I am on this. I wasn’t in Vienna to fuck around, I had a job and I stuck to it. But I wasn’t coming at like Kelly did. I have no problem with metahumans as a baseline, this is the world now and I’m okay adapting to it. That’s the job, that’s life. Kelly _hates_ them.” Ross stared evenly at Hill. “He hates them the way George Wallace hated those little Black kids that just wanted to go to school in his Alabama. Kelly doesn’t see people. He sees freaks.” Ross made himself take a breath. “He’s got to be on SHIELD’s radar already.”

“We’re not wild about him, but he hadn’t tripped our breaker for willing to be corrupt over it. Until you gave us Corcoran’s stick. We’re adjusting accordingly.”

“Adjust hard and fast. Kelly lost his goddamn mind when Steve Rogers wouldn’t sign registration. He’s a guy that would put _Captain America_ in the back of a van with no shocks and some dirty cops. You ever meet him, face to face?”

She shook her head.

“Deadest eyes I’ve seen on an asshole. It’s something hate does to you in general, but he’s got it to his bones. They light up when he’s on the campaign trail, kissing the obligatory baby, but it’s like Stephen King’s deadlights if you know how to look at him. Hollow glints, just the coldest son of a bitch in the ground.”

“I’m catching the hint that you’re not a fan, Ross,” she teased.

“Fuck that guy. How’s that for a hint?” Ross took another breath and closed his eyes, centering himself the way one of his meditation manuals suggested.

“You do Yoga, too?”

The red threatened.

“I’m serious, it helps. Decent Yoga, not the strip mall shit. Course we still gotta ride a line, ‘cause we sorta end up failing the non-violence portions regularly.” She shrugged when he opened his eyes and looked at her. “Anyway, to jump to where you’re poking, he’d be a good opening. We need more trails to follow, press on the cracks Corcoran found.” The next came with a lean back in her seat. “He’s hiring for his DC office. You’ve got the free time, we’ve got the connections to make it happen.”

Tempting. “I’d be recognizable, though.”

“Would you?”

“I literally said I’ve met him-“ Ross stopped himself. SHIELD had more than one way to mask a person up. “Would we have a backup plan if I get made?”

Hill leaned her elbows on the desk and regarded him with a deceptively bland schoolmarm stare over a pair of interlaced hands. “The only decision that has to get made, Agent Ross, is how messy we make your exit interview.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it is my express hope that you read the chapter title in Nandor's voice, if you happen to know who Nandor is. Happy holidays, stay the FUCK home please, and we're building some steam back up, hopefully, maybe, spare everyone some good thoughts.


	6. A Day in the Soup

6\. A Day in the Soup

. . .

Senator Robert Kelly was not called Bob by his friends, family, or by his (dead, may God keep her soul) wife. He had been Robert since he was seven, and he expected he’d die a Robert. There was an office in Boston in his name, and another in in Springfield, and he went to them every few years in time for podium-thumping season. Mostly, he stayed in his office in the Dirkson Senate Office Building, which he liked, because his windows overlooked the United States Supreme Court.

Justice was _the_ hot-button topic for the senior senator from Massachusetts, and had been for the last twenty-five years. Justice slammed down on all, equal under the eye of God, he was fond of saying. Justice was thus a miracle of faith, requisitioned and empowered by higher matters. There were well-intentioned men and women on the other side of the aisle who attempted to prove that some systemic injustice had crept into their union’s perfect system. He respected his colleagues, but he knew better. Why else would their country be so tested now? Justice had to be firm, to stand rigid in the face of these new… problems… that infested their country.

It was racism, said his colleagues. Nonsense. Kelly kept a picture of Adam Brashear on the wall behind his desk where official visitors could see it. Adam had been a Gulf War I veteran who’d stepped up to halt an attack just outside the senate building. Good man. He should have been lauded nationally, but Kelly was all too aware of the newly-rising racial tensions in the country and suggested to the President that Brashear’s actions stayed quiet. But they’d given the man a medal, cleared some medical debts. A good man, a shame poverty claimed him later when some chronic disorder ate him up. Had nothing to do with the war, despite what some claimed. Gulf War Syndrome was nonsense, according to the reports from his trusted corporations.

The uglier liberals on the other side of the aisle had set up a slew of attack ads using Brashear during his last primary. Detestable. They had the _nerve_ to suggest that instead of protecting the fellow, Kelly was the central figure involved in covering up the fact that a Black Muslim-American was a national hero. They claimed that Brashear’s slide into poverty could have been prevented by addressing what _they_ called systemic racism. The inherent violence of a system that deliberately harmed Black Americans more than most.

Poverty as violence. May God bless them, thought Kelly. America held all men as equal, and all he was trying to do was make sure that happened. Adam had been a good man, and God’s will chose his fate. Not Kelly’s politics. He shook his head and came back to the present, glancing up as the pair of new hires the Boston offices sent his way arrived.

One was a young college boy, the sort of fidgety, too-clean lad that undoubtedly smoked dope on the weekend. A clean polo, some khakis, a kid by the name of Steve. He’d be alright for a little while, Kelly supposed. Maybe he needed a proper father figure to straighten him out. He glanced at the paperwork. Emmanuel College. His sister went to Wellesley. That might foretell a problem. Ah, well.

The other man was a touch older. Kelly squinted at his face, wondering if he needed new glasses. That face seemed fuzzy for a moment, but it snapped into place a moment later. Age waited for no man, Kelly supposed. The younger man had sandy, moppy hair, and a face a bit like a thumb. He looked like he wanted to hunch but didn’t. Wore a tie, at least. Something about his posture and the way he was looking around Kelly’s office seemed a bit more aware than most. The paperwork was generic. Boston College, poli sci degree. Martin Nygaard. This one might work out.

“Gentlemen,” said Kelly, in his best fatherly, welcoming voice. He interlaced his hands together and laid them on the desk in front of him, smiling as warmly as he could.

Steve bobbed his head. “Sir.”

“Senator Kelly,” said Nygaard, more formally.

Kelly glanced at Nygaard approvingly in a blank, professional way that didn’t really see him. If he had _actually_ looked, he might have caught something in Nygaard’s face that said the new hire was looking down at a lizard and was not exactly impressed. “I hear Sally’s vouched for you both. Well, that’s fine. I’m going to have you boys come up to speed ‘round the office. Steve, I’ll have you meet up with the other interns, get a feel for phone banking.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Martin, do you know your way around the Capitol?”

“I do,” said Nygaard. Laconic fellow. Very good.

Kelly tried on the smile again, his thoughts already moving back towards the latest metahuman amendments he was working on. “Excellent. I’ll have you do some running around for me.”

. . .

Steve looked at Martin nervously. “Did you volunteer for Mr. Kelly?”

“Yeah,” said Ross, vaguely making an effort to be Nygaard, a thirtysomething wonk trying to move into the behinds the scenes games of federal politics. The photostatic field making his face look several years younger and less inherently cranky was somehow itchier than Ross expected and it was creeping into his voice. He should have gone with the other option. At least he would have known the magic would itch and he could have been better prepared for it. “You came in through the intern pool, I take it.”

“I wanted to be assigned to Warren. Not this guy.” The kid sighed. “But maybe I shouldn’t say that.”

“Kelly’s an asshole,” said Ross, making the kid jerk a little in surprise. “But he’s useful for learning how politics work.”

“I… guess.” Steve flicked a look at him, reconsidering. “Not your first rodeo, huh?”

“Unfortunately,” said Ross, walking off with the five pounds of bullshit memos Kelly loaded him down with. Let Nygaard get a reputation for being a pragmatic asshole. It worked great for his real life, why not his new undercover gig? Never fuck with a good thing, reckoned Ross. Fewer lies made fewer mistakes.

Ross knew Capitol Hill just fine. It took him forty minutes to deliver Kelly’s garbage, skimming the stapled top memos to see if there was anything interesting. There wouldn’t be, the senator wasn’t going to casually hand the new guy a stack of evidence about his off the book dealings. But it made for general coffee table talk, he’d look involved in what was going on, and his new face would get recognizable and thus, ignored.

DC interns and most office office staff were furniture. Optimally, the furniture blended in with the wallpaper. You were invisible unless required. Until then, you hold onto the daily bag of shit and drink a lot of coffee. Ross was an expert at these things, and the nanotech mask he was wearing helped hide the grimacing ‘who farted?’ expression that came out whenever he was on the Hill as himself.

. . .

 _Four days later_ ~

Robert Kelly pinched his lips together as he listened to someone on the other side of the line. Ross, as Nygaard, continued to organize the Senator’s daily briefing memos on the desk with an uninterested look on his face. It was mostly legitimate; the bulk of Kelly’s calls were lobbyists and corporate donors, nothing worth any of his own interest. Agent Hill had slipped him an upgraded bug that would trap both sides of the Senator’s cell audio, but she’d told him it had a limited battery once activated and needed to be within range of the phone.

Ross was pretty sure Kelly wasn’t taking any of his ‘good’ calls in the office, so the bug sat in his pocket, waiting for a good moment to take in. He had already proved his worth as furniture, rotating like a satellite around Kelly without interfering or requiring being acknowledged as a person. He hated the general unperson status Capitol drones gradually earned, but admitted to himself it was far better than actually _talking_ to the prick.

In the week since being inserted into the office, Ross’s prior dislike of Senator Kelly was becoming fine-honed. Nothing was actionable or useful to him in his undercover status, but he loathed being in hearing range as Kelly shot down an alliance among three other senators for a relief bill that could have changed lives in Philadelphia. The reasoning was obviously money, but Kelly was also passing it off as a dangerous salvo in class warfare, a standard bullshit talking point that only worked if one ignored the fact that the class attempting to engage in ‘class warfare’ mostly wanted things like an actual fucking grocery store in their redlined neighborhoods.

Worst of all, Ross realized that Kelly actually _believed_ in his own particular brand of bullshit. God’s equality wasn’t for the senator to upset. This revelation told Ross that if Kelly was for sure in it with AIM then he’d already justified it to himself in some spiritually unshakeable way.

In Ross’s experience with extremists, that sort of mentality was near impossible to overcome. They were hardened, taught to live inside not a bubble but an armored dome of dogmatic principles. Ordinary people caught up in the group could be split out and reabsorbed into their local communities, but the central leadership was often all in, birth to death.

Flipping Kelly wasn’t going to work. Bracing him and trying to guilt him into giving even a hint of evidence wasn’t going to work. Hell, the dude wasn’t even banging his press secretary. Kelly went from holy church on Sunday to fucking over the Democratic poor on Monday. So, espionage it was. More than fine with Ross.

. . .

“You’re sitting on an unused bug, Ross. I have to spend hours a day monitoring intake to make sure we move on whatever you get, and I’m already done with two seasons of _Parks and Rec_.” Maria Hill’s deadpan voice came through his burner phone perfectly clear. Of course it did; SHIELD got anonymous Starktech phones on bulk discount for their disposables. CIA gave you a refurb’d Cricket.

Ross told himself he wasn’t being bitter. “You only gave me one bug.”

“I can get you another bug. Tech depo flips them out of the oven fresh daily.”

He was not feeling a _hint_ of bitterness, no sir. “That wasn’t the impression I had. We don’t usually get a lot of extra supply.”

“Not our fault CIA once tried to strap a radio to a cat, Ross.”

His fingers squeaked around the phone’s plastic case. Probably got picked up on mic. “Must be nice to not have to answer to the federal budget.”

“Are you being bitter at me, Ross?”

“No,” he lied.

“Okay,” said Hill, so cheerily that he knew that she knew and that he was getting madder. “Just bug the asshole’s office daily, we’ll figure out the signal to noise ratio while you recon his contacts and keep flipping his papers.”

“You said it had a limited battery.”

“Yeah, like six hours. I’ve never seen a Senator stay in his office more than four in a day. If you guys don’t do a full wire, isn’t the average for your bugs like two?”

Ross was alone in a rented apartment that went eight buyers deep before there was even a _hint_ that the place was actually a safehouse for DC SHIELD agents. He was pretty sure they had their own monitoring equipment in the place, though he hadn’t bothered to check, and so when he rolled his eyes and sneered, he hoped they saw it in 4K ultra HD. “Six hours. I was also not under that impression.”

“Double A batteries are too big for audio bugs, Ross,” she teased.

“I hate this guy,” he said, knowing it was a complete non sequitur. But what the hell, he did.

“Yeah, we’ve got a couple kids doing the legwork on what you told me. Did you know Kelly signed a secret memo that asked the majority leader to consider not recognizing Wakanda at the UN? Most tone deaf thing I read in, like, a month, Ross.”

“No, I somehow had not heard that. The hell was the basis?”

“No UN observers inside to be sure the country wasn’t a metahuman sanctuary country. Claimed there was evidence to the contrary. They were so careful to make it not an overtly racial thing that it has that stinky cologne you only ever smell on certain South Carolina Republicans. You get me?”

“Loud and clear.” _We have African friends! It’s not like that!_ But under that dusty Senate letterhead. “I warned you.”

“Bug him. Let me clear up the rest of your misconceptions. Damn the expense, we’re bankrolling you. If you get invited to dinner with the boss — there’s a good chance, by the way, it seems Kelly likes to bring new office drones home after a couple of weeks in the soup — bug the hell out of his house, too. Any other questions, just text me. We have _money_ , Ross, and a whole lot of motivation.”

“CIA isn’t impoverished.” SHIELD had tips about Kelly’s _dinner plans_ already? The fuck was he doing puttering around the Capitol?

Ross was feeling _very_ bitter.

“Not if it’s one of their pet projects, they aren’t. Woe betide anything off the dinner menu. Want to still try and tell me they didn’t shove you in the basement with the UFO files after you took a field trip with us?”

He flushed. “The X-Files was about the FBI.”

“I know you get my point, Ross.”

. . .

“Did you see that look he gave us?” Director Phil Coulson lounged against the side of the metal cage holding the monitoring equipment, a mug of lukewarm and rather disgusting coffee in his hand. “If he’d known exactly where the cameras were, it’d have been like a heat ray.”

Maria Hill rolled a look over to him, then glanced back at the display. Ross still kept to a nightly routine, and all she was doing was making sure his current territory was secure. She flipped off the monitor, leaving the audio tech to record if external activity triggered it. “He’s got reason to be sassy.”

“You’re also egging him on a little, agent.”

Maria shrugged. “He’s easy to rile.” She glanced at the director. “Not like you don’t do the same thing to some of your guys.”

Phil lifted up one eyebrow in a particularly emotive waggle. _What, me?_ “You like him?”

“Not enough to ask him out to dinner. He’s got anger management issues and I prefer flying solo.” She swiveled away from the monitoring station, getting up and putting her hands on her hips, thinking. “I just don’t think he’s gonna leave CIA. Even after this.”

“You think?” Coulson frowned.

She shook her head. “That place _needs_ his ass. Someone to keep their outfit from being its worst self all the time. That’s why some of ‘em keep trying to push him out.” Hill glanced at Coulson. “Sound familiar?”

Coulson sighed. “Ah, well.” He gestured to her with his mug, cartoonishly painted with a purple worm on a string and a neon cursive slogan that read ‘Keep On Tuggin!’ before turning towards the door. “Keep me in the loop, Hill.”

“Will do, chief.”

. . .

Kelly caught sight of the nice young man returning up the steps, only a few folders left under his arm. Nygaard always had a look on his face when minding his own business, Kelly mused to himself. The overly serious mask of a man who knew he was doing his best in a den of corruption. Admirable, really. And once he realized he was being watched, that expression smoothed over into something professional and plain. Excellent.

Martin Nygaard could go far. “Martin!” called Kelly. He gestured the intern over with his black aluminum Halliburton briefcase. Nygaard glanced at the briefcase, then at him, before popping up the last few steps towards him. Kelly bobbed a nod at the younger man. “How are you today?”

Nygaard blinked. “Fine, sir.”

“Still a man of few words. We’ll have to soften you up a bit, young man.” Senator Kelly reached out and clapped his intern on the back of his shoulder. Like his own father would have. Nygaard rocked a little. “Come to dinner Friday night. I’m having a few friends over. It’ll be good for you.”

“Sir?”

Kelly gave him one of his patented paternal smiles. “At least half of all political actions are accomplished over dinner, Nygaard. Get to know the people and their palette, and you’ve got the keys to Washington.”

“Yes, sir.” Nygaard cocked his head, considering him. “At Stanton Park?”

“Very good. I’m just a few houses down from the majority leader himself.” Kelly chuckled warmly. “He might join us for a nightcap, although I believe he’s otherwise booked for the night.”

“I’m sure,” said Nygaard with the correctly professional amount of blandness. “Shall I bring anything?”

“A nice wine wouldn’t go unused. Nothing too foreign.”

“Of course.”

Kelly gave him another slap on the back. Odd, the young man didn’t look as surprised as he thought. Dinner with the boss was a big deal when Kelly was a boy. Ah, well, decided Kelly. Probably another testament to the man’s game face.

. . .

“Fuck,” said Ross to no one in particular, staring up the Capitol steps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WE'RE BACK. AND WE'RE AHEAD.
> 
> Let's hope this streak holds up. Should be back to weekly, barring weird shit.
> 
> please, no more weird shit.
> 
> Robert Kelly is a name that should be familiar to X-Men fans. His views do not reflect the author's at all. Ever.


	7. Red, Red Wine

7\. Red, Red Wine

. . .

Ross was cradling a nice ’18 California red, nothing too strong on the palate but enough flavor to give any would-be sommeliers something to talk about. He would have rather gone for a Heineken and an Advil, and he wasn’t even up the steps to what had once been a homey old brownstone. Before the shitty white paint job Kelly paid about fifty grand to have done to it a couple decades back.

Political acumen sometimes contraindicated good taste. Ross could already picture the internal decor. He bet himself that Heineken that there’d be a tastelessly enormous portrait of Jesus near the central staircase. One of those smooth-faced porcelain looking ones with the glowing heart. The rest of it would be generic old guy widgets, like sailing boat models and shit.

Sometimes Ross made an effort to approach a new situation with an even-keeled, pragmatic attitude. This was not one of those times, and he was trying to get as much sourness out of his system before he had to fake it. Kelly had been insufferably chatty all week since the invitation, as if they were old time buddies now. Ross was also seeing the other intern, Steve, less often, which pissed him off. The college kid had a good heart and a better temperament for this stuff than he ever did. Hopefully Steve was going to end up in the office of someone who’d appreciate him.

Ross watched his footing coming up the stone steps; they were old, concrete, and surprisingly tall, and found the door already opening when he got to the landing. “Hi,” he said to the guy just inside. The guy was that smooth, post-military fifty, with his salt and pepper hair cut regulation short. He had the calm, humorless stare every career Secret Service agent cultivated. Ross knew Kelly rated a security detail at home. Here it was. “Nygaard, Martin. Hill intern. I’m invited.”

The agent clinically looked him over as his earbud crackled and then whispered something to him. “Mr. Nygaard.” Even his voice was modulated. “Come in, please.”

Ross stepped over the threshold and handed the wine over to the second agent that was hiding in the lee of the door, who had the skill to not react to Ross knowing he’d be there. Stone Cold Doorman gave him a sweep that didn’t pick up the bug in his shoe. Starktech made good stuff. Somehow that didn’t make Ross feel any better. “Do you want to take the wine in, or shall I deliver it to the Senator?”

“I’ll take it into the kitchen,” said the younger Secret Service guy, checking the label. “Vina Robles, nice.”

“I wanted to bring a Burgundy, but they’re specifically French, so,” said Ross with carefully pitched hesitation, verbally testing the waters here.

“I’d have drunk it,” said the guy. “Just because everyone else here-“

“Malcolm,” said Stone Cold, terse but not unkind.

Ross kept his game face on, watching the younger one, Malcolm, take off. These guys wouldn’t take his side if he got caught doing something stupid tonight, but they also weren’t going to be Kelly loyalists. It was something, anyway.

The door shut behind him as he heard footsteps deeper within the place. That would be Kelly. Ross’s eyes adjusted to the dimness to take in the huge painting by the staircase. With a grimace he barely managed to pause, he realized he’d misjudged his situation. Badly.

It wasn’t one of those hideous but kindly paintings of Christ. It was a deliberately grimy, hardwood-framed replica of Guido Reni’s _The_ _Crucifixion of St Peter_. The aging saint was upside down and tied to his inverted cross, trapped in place by two men. The red-capped workman was on the cusp of hammering the first nail through Peter’s feet. The copy on display had dimmed what was supposed to be a redeeming blue sky. Instead it was a grim, faded grey. The baroque red cap was the color of drying blood. The effect was deliberately, insistently hopeless. Leeched of every bit of pride or faith, only the relentless horror of murder in the name of justice.

A faint but emotional “fuck” slipped through Ross’s lips as he looked at the horrible thing.

“Gives me a shudder every goddamn day,” said Stone Cold from behind him, just as quietly. “Square it up,” he warned Ross, more warmly this time.

Ross adjusted his posture and put on his pleasantly bland face just in time for Kelly’s shoes to clack into the foyer. “Sir.”

“Nygaard! Properly early. Good of you, son, Agent Malcolm says you brought us a very nice red.” Kelly offered his hand in the overeager welcoming shake of all politicians over fifty. He nodded to Stone Cold. “All clear, Sanderson?”

“Yessir,” said Agent Sanderson, formerly known as Stone Cold, whose face didn’t give away a hint of Ross’s reaction a second ago. Ross adjusted his assessment accordingly. “Have a pleasant dinner, sir. We’ll be on patrol.”

. . .

“Nygaard, this is James, you should know him from the Hill.” The Senator from Arizona allowed a curt nod at Kelly’s ‘intern.’ Names droned as Kelly went around the table, most of which he knew. It wasn’t the biggest Hill dinner he’d seen, this one was fairly personal. Just over a dozen politicos and donor class sycophants. The only people he didn’t recognize were seated near Kelly’s place at the head of the table. He filed away the various names, making mental notes as he went. “And here’s tonight’s two very special guests. This is Mr. Agger.”

Dario Agger nodded to Ross. The Roxxon CEO looked disinterested, but at least he also looked pretty calm tonight. There were _rumors_ about Agger and his temper. Rumors that suggested SHIELD would love to know what the hell this guy was doing here tonight. It was probably some legal stock manipulation fuckery, but barely. Ross nodded back and starting glancing around nervously again, like an intern would.

“This is Mr. Tarleton. George, I’m _so_ glad we could get you out of the lab tonight.”

The skin along Ross’s back rippled. He looked down into the face of AIM’s current chief scientist, one of the few people named in Corcoran’s files. He was an ordinary looking guy. Standard issue ‘I work in a lab and haven’t seen the sun since February’ glasses. He wore a tie, at least, and it didn’t match his shirt. Both were too expensive for him. Why was the scientist here? Shouldn’t it be some generic AIM lobbyist? “Hi,” said Ross, holding out a hand to Tarleton with a slight but noticeably nervous shake. Scientists forced into the open air were usually as awkward as interns.

Tarleton seemed to relax, sensing someone from his own social strata. He took ‘Nygaard’s’ hand with relief. “Martin. Glad to meet you.”

Ross bobbed his head and shuffled away like he was supposed to, heading to the other end of the table with the two junior senators and their wives. The chair was pulled out for him, he somehow didn’t see who did it. Probably Malcolm. It seemed like the sort of gig where the young agents would do basic courtesies just to kill boredom. Nobody wanted to get at Kelly. He was awful but anodyne, not worth taking the shot.

Ross’s opinion went the other way, feeling that sooner or later Kelly was going to put himself out there enough that some rightfully angry kid with lasers in his fingernails was going to risk it. But that wasn’t his problem. He looked down at his silverware, the drone of ‘friendly’ DC jockeying going on around him.

“So. You’re Kelly’s new kid,” said the voice from across the table as the second round of bread rolls made its passage. Ross looked up at Agger, who wasn’t that much older than himself. Ross kept from narrowing his eyes, remembering he looked younger right now. Enough for a CEO to be a dick about it. “How do you put up with it?”

“Dario,” chuckled Kelly, a hardness flickering behind his eyes. “Don’t scare off my staffers.”

“Your personality does it for you, Bob.” Agger, the ‘Minotaur of Roxxon,’ took a sniff of the white wine being poured for this part of the meal. He didn’t look at Kelly. He kept his focus on ‘Nygaard’ instead. “You a true believer, or you looking at the long game?”

“Sir?” asked Ross.

“The money is on our side of the table. If you’ve got the talent to get into a Senator’s office and make it onto the dinner invites, it’s just a little bit of a walk up the stairs to the real power.” Agger tossed him an aggressive wink.

Kelly put down his butter knife, his elbows on the table. “You’re poaching him. At my dinner table. To my face.” That hard look still gleamed in his eyes, like ice. Ross knew how to read it. They weren’t friends. This was a business relationship, and Agger liked to push on his bought-and-paid-for buddy whenever he could.

George Tarleton, not as savvy, looked between the pair. His face twitched like a horse’s tail in a fly-filled barn, uncertain and off balance.

Ross leaned back and chuckled, drawing attention back to himself. “Sorry, Mr. Agger. I’m a true believer. The little guy _can_ make a difference in the long run.” He smiled, gormless. “The money in politics is a pretty big hurdle, but conviction outlasts checks.”

Kelly laughed, the tension popping.

Agger pointed at Ross with his fork. “Keep telling yourself that, son. When you get cynical, lobbyists and people like us are always hiring.”

“Ugh,” said the wife of one of the junior senators. “Dario, it’s gauche to talk money at the dinner table.”

“I’ll wait till after dessert.” Agger leaned back with a vicious wink. It put a chill down Ross’s back. He’d never been in a room with Agger before, and he didn’t care for the atmosphere he emanated. The man knew his own reputation for terror and went out of his way to amplify it even when it didn’t matter.

Tarleton looked nauseous. He nursed the glass of water he had instead of wine and reached for a third bread roll.

Kelly shot a look at the scientist and made an almost imperceptible gesture towards the hallway. Ross watched a kitchen staffer dart off, probably to get the next course. The drone settled back into cozy unimportance.

. . .

Dessert was a series of individual chocolate truffles and the red wine Ross brought, which he tried to not feel a slight twinge of pride about. After that, the general wandering around the house and glad-handing went back into full swing. The party stayed on the main two floors with their own short steps connecting. A quick glance down hallways told Ross he had access to the foyer, the sitting room where most of the guests were now idling, the dining room, a long hall to a very busy kitchen, and a discreetly placed crapper with those decorative hand-towels nobody dared touch. Anything useful to him was upstairs on what was probably another two levels. Past Agent Sanderson, who stayed leashed to the foyer.

Magnificent. Ross gave him a polite nod as he went to take his dessert plate into the kitchen. He’d snacked deliberately slowly, wanting to use this trip as an excuse to look for any other nooks or pathways.

The kitchen crew didn’t notice him. Professionals. They took their dinner orders from Kelly, cleaned up after their job, and minded their own business otherwise. Ross scanned the kitchen. One more hallway, probably through a mudroom and a back exit. That would have a camera on it.

He half-turned and he saw exactly what he was hoping for. A bunch of the Stanton Park brownstones were old enough to have had dumbwaiters back in the day, but security didn’t like them. They went unused. But a handful got reworked. Ross juked quickly into the narrow hallway, eying an even narrower staircase that drilled both up and down. A shortcut for getting the senator his nightcap, or an office after hours snack. The kitchen staff was vetted, probably long-timers. And the security detail had no reason to feel stressed. It was a gap, a bad one. Great for him, though.

Ross went up, his eyes on his feet and his ears focusing on what was ahead. The stairs were hardwood, well-cared for. No squeaking; in fact he saw no-slip grippies every few steps. No cameras, it was too old and too tight in here.

The kitchen staircase came up around a rebuilt corner and then continued upward to what was probably the bedroom floor. He peeked around the third floor, what he guessed was Kelly’s office floor, and saw no one. Three doors along a sectioned hallway with its main staircase down a little hall of its own. Malcolm was probably touring outside the building.

He poked his head inside the first room. Private library, a reading chair, window, fireplace. Boats on the mantle. Homey bullshit.

Second room, a home office. Central desk, a big landline phone, and a bunch of paperwork waiting for Kelly’s return. Ross darted off to check the third room to be sure and found a Peloton, a wall-mounted TV, and more generic old man bullshit. He went back to the second, checking for visible monitoring devices. Seeing nothing, he lifted up his leg to slide the heel of his shoe half an inch. SHIELD’s bug dropped into his hand. As he kicked the heel back into place, he slipped the self-adhering tiny device under Kelly’s desk and thumbed it alive. The stack of papers didn’t have anything good. Then he got the hell out, moving back down the stairs as quickly and quietly as possible.

The kitchen crew still didn’t give a shit.

But Agent Sanderson paused him on the way back, looking him over. Everett Ross was forty-nine, and as fit as he was, a fast jaunt up and down a staircase was going to show on his disguised face. “All right, son?”

“Wine and the chowder,” said Ross, without skipping a beat. The crapper was behind him, wasn’t it? A mental map flashed in his mind. Yes, it was. He relaxed. “I can’t eat like I’m a college kid anymore, even if I’m doing a college kid’s job.”

Sanderson gave him that soft little snort-laugh of a man that knows. “It won’t get any better.” He gave Ross a nod and let him by.

“There you are!” Dario Agger saluted him with a glass of wine the second he arrived in the parlor. “Kelly tells me you’re the son of a bitch with a palette. If we’d let _him_ pick the red, we’d be downing fucking Franzia right now!”

A chuckle of appreciation went around the room, with a good natured smile and murderous glance from Senator Kelly.

The party went downhill from there for Ross, but in that boring small talk glad handy bullshit way that would give him a hangover worse than any alcohol. It would be almost an hour before he could dip.

_Hopefully that bug’ll pick up something useful, because God help me if I have to do this again._


	8. Mixtape

8\. Mixtape

. . .

Maria Hill jiggled her noodle soup by way of stirring it, her eyes half-lidded as the recorded audio file acknowledged another hour of silence. She hit the pause before it began spitting whatever inane office garbage Kelly segued into next. “God, how long did that party last?”

“I wasn’t the first one out the door, and I left at 9:30. Snuck around the bushes for ‘bout an hour, took that long for anyone else to leave. The senator from Kentucky, if I got the cars right.” Ross sipped at a mug of coffee, his hair a hungover mess. Three Heinekens, the Advil, and about fourteen hours of sleep on a Saturday made him feel almost human again.

He knew he was visually contrasting with the put-together SHIELD agent, but on the other hand, she was drinking leftover Campell’s out of a thermos for a late breakfast. It was a wash. He put his ugly old slippers up on the edge of the desk, grateful that Hill had trundled portable equipment over in an attache no bigger than a laptop case. It gave him room to plop. “That’s the 11pm mark, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” She hit play, listening to the rustle of papers and the squeak of seats.

“ _Agger, you’re an exhausting son of a bitch_ ,” muttered an unseen Senator Kelly. His old leather chair squeaked for angry emphasis.

A warning purr from Agger. “ _You won’t say that to me again, Bob. Not if you want my help in the midterms. Not if you want anything from me, ever._ ”

“ _Deals with the devil._ ” Quiet. Bitter. Then the senator’s voice became almost wheedling. “ _Where’s Roxxon on our little project? It’d be a good corporate cause._ ”

“ _I’m not buying in, Kelly. Your obsession is shit. Getting mad at evolution because you don’t know how to monetize it or roll with it-_ “

“ _It’s not about the money, Agger._ ”

Agger’s voice was almost feral. “ _Then you’re a dipshit. Pulling this holy roller crap because you’re mad that maybe God didn’t personally design every human cell isn’t good business, and it’s not gonna be good politics long-term. Sometime in the next ten years a kid with green skin and fucking antennae is gonna want to go to public school, and if you want to be the guy to stand on the steps with a shotgun and an attitude about it, you’re gonna get spanked._ ”

“Did not take Agger for a social liberal,” said Ross, his eyebrow arching. He wasn’t being serious.

“It’s his ass, too,” said Hill, tapping the on-screen pause and putting her soup down. “Kelly won’t move him to his side, not on this topic. It’s the one thing we can be sure of. Workshop says he’s a verified shifter in addition to diagnosed sociopath. Roxxon’s staying in our wheelhouse for a reason.”

“The minotaur thing is _legit_?” Ross lowered his coffee mug and stared at the SHIELD agent, not exactly disbelieving but still taken aback.

“The minotaur thing is super legit. Our magic man snuck in and ran a deep scan on him about a year back, just so we could get some details for his file. I won’t quote, because you know him. He’s, uh, artistic with his language. But he had some pretty scathing ideas on who slammed uglies with who somewhere down the Agger family line. Vivid stuff. The Zeus myths are probably pretty close, going by our guy’s assessment.”

“Thanks, I hate knowing that.”

“So did he.” Hill let the audio roll again. “Something about a horse.”

Ross didn’t understand that, so he went back to listening to Agger letting himself out of Kelly’s office. If that was the last guest, then this recording was a bust. He opened his mouth to curse, then slammed it shut when another chair, not the swivel of Kelly’s office throne, squeaked.

“ _George, I’m sorry you had to see that. Agger is a useful man, for a sinner._ ”

“ _It’s all right, Mr. Kelly,_ ” said George Tarleton, somehow even sounding twitchy. “ _He’s a reminder that the work is valuable._ ”

Hill shot a quick glance at Ross before dragging a notepad in front of her.

“ _And how is the work going_?”

“ _It stutters. There are too many eyes, too many ways for information to leak. I control what I can._ ”

“ _Well, it’s going to be a while before we can consolidate our allies on the Hill. I know we’ve got some friends in high places, and they’ve told me they scrapped a couple little problems before they got anywhere._ ”

“Shit,” breathed Ross.

“ _But it’s a great relief to know we have a friend in today’s AIM. You know, that Killian, he had some useful ideas. Useful ideas. But the execution… so much damage._ ” The sound of Kelly sighing. “ _Ironic that his death helped prove certain of my claims. These technologies, these… changes… some of them are dangerous. Too dangerous, George. Once, we might’ve been able to keep Stark on board, but…_ ”

“ _Stane was a good man,_ ” said Tarleton, softly. “ _He understood the mathematics of risk management. A critical tool for a corporate man, not like Mr. Killian. If he hadn’t overreached… it’s a flaw of our kind, Robert. Scientists. Thinkers. We fall into the lyrics of math and forget the patterns under it._ ”

“ _And now Stark is a risk. Him and all of his… freak buddies._ ” Kelly pushed back in the seat, hard. “ _The one that claims to be a God, that Thor. An absolute heresy. Well, at least we’ve earned some allies. Good ones. Good men._ ” He exhaled. “ _I’m on edge. I feel like something’s pressing too close, George. That mole got too close._ ”

“ _Corcoran isn’t a problem anymore._ ” Oddly calm words from Tarleton, delivered in a monotone.

Ross jerked in his seat, spilling the remaining half-inch of coffee down the flannel lapel of his robe. He didn’t notice, his face was shoved into the imageless monitor as if he might be able to commune directly with Tarleton. “Where is he?”

“ _Well, as long as you can get useful data out of him. We need to know where the remaining choke points are, stabilize our coalition. That’s the key, George. The mice must be most cautious when the tigers are hungry. Let them starve until they’re feeble. Then we’ll rise to the top of Capitol Hill._ ”

“Fuck does that mean,” muttered Ross. His eyes scanned the audio analysis, none of it meaning anything to him.

“Ross, sit down.” Hill put a hand on his flannel arm, gently pushing back him out of the way.

“ _Anyway, son, I’m glad you could join us tonight. It’s important to keep perspective. See your enemy, and know them._ ”

“ _Thank you, sir,_ ” said George, modestly. A curious pause. “ _I liked your new intern._ ”

Ross bared his teeth, but he sat down.

“ _He’s a good man, Nygaard. He’ll go far._ ”

Both chairs squeaked, the faint sound of hands clasping. A moment later, the audio automatically cut off.

. . .

“Corcoran’s alive.” Ross was pacing, his coffee long since forgotten. The robe was flapping dramatically as he moved, the faded Phantom Menace tee and sweatpants he was wearing by way of pajamas revealed for all to witness.

Hill had refused to remark on the faded image of a long-haired Liam Neeson staring at her, and she wasn’t going to start now. She couldn’t stop glancing at it, either, as he swept by on another half-feral patrol. “That’s good news, Ross.”

“We don’t know where he is.”

“Tarleton does.” She clicked her tongue. “That said, AIM facilities are pretty hardened right now. With the Extremis thing in the rearview mirror, it’s private security and a few military patrols at most sites, keeping things on the up and up. Walking in without an appointment doesn’t happen.”

“I know that,” said Ross, brittle.

Hill inhaled, letting his tone wash over her. He wasn’t insulting her directly, and she doubted he would. His friend was alive, and Ross wasn’t the kind of guy that made friends quickly or easily. Of course he was whipped up. “It’d be a lot of whack a mole to try and get you inside any of those facilities. A lot of wasted time. And right now, it’s not likely we can get at Tarleton direct. Same principle, he’s the big deal pet scientist with the big deal contact list, so he’s gotta stay on the up and up. Usually. So. Here’s the first good news: AIM obviously has some off the books facilities.”

Ross stopped to peer at her, his face pinching. “ _That’s_ the good news?”

“Yeah. If they’re holding someone and nobody’s squawked, that’s a vulnerability for them. That means private security, private systems. They’ll be good, sure, but our tools are better. And they can’t call the emergency line if we make a misstep — probably. So, we find a house we can get into, which is likely to be in that file dump Corcoran sent. I’ve got another update on them due in five hours. They’re at 85% complete, apparently. I have a good feeling about this batch. You’ll get the read-out as soon as I can put together a proper brief.” She grinned at him. “Anyway, If Tarleton had more reasons to worry about the damaged copy of the file you gave them, or you, it would have come up. They’re confident right now. They think they nipped you and Corcoran’s care package in the bud.”

Ross nodded at her, visibly calming down. “That’s true.”

“So it’s up to you if you want to get off the Hill meanwh-“

“Yes.”

Hill laughed at his audible desperation. “Alright.” She squeaked forward in her desk and tapped a note into her phone. “We’ll get you out within the day. It’s gonna be messy and final, but we’ll make sure it holds up. Hope you didn’t make any more dinner dates.”

“And the off the books sites? Gonna try to insert me into one of those?”

Hill didn’t say anything at first. She pursed her lips, thinking. Eventually she muttered a response, still distracted by something he couldn’t figure. “I’m going to make a couple phone calls.”

“Agent Hill?”

“I’m having an idea. I need someone else to tell me if it’s a good one.” She glanced sidelong at him. “Rolling you through these sites will make a lot of noise, take a lot of time. You’re good, but there’s certain things infil crews know what to look for. I’m thinking a dedicated field ops expert, no offense.”

“None taken, long as they’re competent. And I’m pretty sure you guys have access to competent.”

“Yeah,” said Maria, oddly noncommittally as she began closing up the portables. She followed it up with a thin, odd smile. “Bear with me a little while, Ross. Take a nap or a jog or something. I’ll call when I’ve got something.”

“I… don’t like that look on your face.”

She reared back, the picture of innocence. “I am a perfect professional.”

“Uh huh.”

. . .

Hill waited until she was in the car and on the move away from the safehouse before she picked up her phone, looking in her rearview to be sure no one was on her tail. She fished the phone out of her pocket when she got caught by a red light at the next major intersection, plugging it into the hands-free so she could keep up a scan. The number she called connected, then clicked a couple of times, then connected again. “ _Yeah_?” said a brusque male voice.

She rattled off a handful of numbers and and the current codephrase. The line clicked again as the ‘wrong number’ interference guy put her through. “ _Dispatch_.”

“Kick me up the line to the day supervisor, Kat.” There was no day supervisor. That was the point.

“ _Hi, Maria. Are you driving_?”

Maria glanced at the knot of traffic slowly moving through the intersection. “Technically yes, but honestly, no.”

“ _Jesus. One sec-_ “

“ _Hill_ ,” said a deep voice a second later.

“Hi, Nick.”

“ _How’s your current gig?_ ”

“It’s going. I need a field guy for Ross.” Hill paused, paying attention to the truck ahead of her as their light turned green.

“ _And you’re calling me why?_ ”

“Because going through you to the top shelf special assignment guys is currently easier than crawling up through Coulson, and he knows it and I know it and you know it. It keeps you in the saddle, Nick. You’re not a retirement kinda guy.”

“ _I’m having the time of my life, Hill,_ ” said Nick Fury, in the deadest tone he could muster. The only man that could sound bored on a space station. “ _I can see the ocean from my house._ ”

“Yeah, all of them. You know who I want on this.” She listened to the silence, gauging it. “I’m not just asking to freak Ross out.”

“ _You sure?_ ”

“We need smooth infiltration with potential close combat expertise if things get hairy. No witnesses, if someone gets shaken up by the coming and going of a murder ghost, all the better. We can push the story it’s one of Agger’s plays, cover our ass for a while.”

“ _He isn’t going to agree easily. They didn’t exactly take to each other the last time._ ”

“Last time was business. Tell him Ross is doing this for an old friend. He’ll understand that.” She winced. “Ross’ll understand that.”

“You _tell him. I’m gonna give him your phone number._ ”

“It’s a good idea, though.”

“ _You telling me that, or telling yourself, Hill?_ ”

Maria grimaced as her car finally picked up speed. “I’ll figure it out later.”


End file.
